RUSH: To Raleigh, North Carolina. Hi, Michael. You’re next, and it’s great to have you here. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I hope you and Kathryn have a wonderful Valentine’s Day.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very, very much.

CALLER: You’re very welcome. I listened to your whole show yesterday and heard you very well describe Obama as the crusader and the warrior, but I’d like to add, what helps him with the low-information voters is he plays the victim very well.

RUSH: Well, of course. That’s part and parcel of the whole theory that I espoused yesterday. He is crusader and warrior, but the key to understanding how low-information voters see Obama, he’s not governing. He’s not responsible for anything. He’s not accountable. Nothing that’s happening can be tied to him.

CALLER: And that’s why they associate themselves with him. It’s not their fault I don’t have a job and I can’t make any money.

RUSH: Right, he’s trying to fix it. And he and they are victims, as you say, these powerful forces, these invisible people behind the screens pulling all these levers, taking everything for themselves. Obama is trying to fix it and get everything back. And so far he’s five years into the project. It’s taking a little longer than people thought, but he’s not responsible. His policies have no relationship to the reality of this country at all. There’s no connection whatsoever.

CALLER: Exactly right. And neither do their poor, pathetic lives. They have no responsibility over it.

RUSH: So you think part and parcel of this is playing the victim. He and everybody else are victimized by all of these powerful forces. Not only is he trying to fix it, he’s being stopped from fixing it. He’s doing everything he can to bring the deficit down. He’s doing everything he can to lower the debt, but my God, the Republicans keep thwarting him at every turn. He wants to raise taxes on the people who are responsible for this, and the Republicans won’t let him. They continue to defend the people who cause the problems. This is how the low-information voter sees it.

Now, I want to reiterate something. It’s not as easy as it sounds. For example, there’s not a Republican who can pull this off because to pull this kind of thing off as Obama is, you need a totally compliant and slavish media, totally on your side and willing to carry your water and your message and your talking points each and every day. And then you need no conscience. You cannot possibly have a conscience and pull off something like this. And I think this is why, when Obama says the sweetest thing you can do to get revenge, is vote. Remember when we heard that during the campaign, late in the campaign? We all said, “Revenge against who?” Well, now, we know. All of us. The people who are working. The people who are not suffering. The people who are perceived not to be suffering. Revenge against us.

Obama’s leading the charge of the vengeful, and he’s seeking to address their grievances. He’s their leader in this regard. But it’s a fascinating thing. You are president of the United States, but you are never perceived as governing. You are not seen as in charge. Your agenda has no relationship whatsoever to what’s happening in the country. This is how you can get polling data that shows a vast majority of people disagree with every Obama policy, but they don’t blame him for the policy. They don’t associate him with the policy. They still reelect him. They do not connect Obama and his policies to what is happening in the country. And he pulls this off because he is in constant campaign mode.

He’s always running against whoever and whatever these powerful forces are that are creating all of this misery and havoc, and it’s been going on for a long time. Bush, even before that, Reagan. Even the Founding Fathers. I mean, from the days the country was founded. And Obama has finally, the country’s finally put somebody in charge to fix it. It’s gonna take more than one term. Can’t do it all in one term. May not be able to do it in two, and he even told his supporters this. May not be able to pull it all off in one term. So the fact that the debt is skyrocketing and that his policies are causing it, is not seen. That connection isn’t made because Obama is never seen as in charge. He holds the office, and he gets the perks, and he’s a celebrity, but he’s not in charge. He’s not accountable. He’s not responsible.

He does his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, and he makes another laundry list of promises which nobody thinks will ever happen, but what they serve to do is further illuminate for people what needs to be fixed and that he is out there trying to fix it, and he is lined up against powerful forces that are arrayed against him who are trying to protect all the unfairness and injustice and wealth that they have amassed over the course of the nation’s history that they don’t want to share, that they don’t want to give up. And Obama is simply saying to everybody, these people have had too much for too long, and they’ve made it so that the playing field isn’t level and not everybody has a fair shake.

So in saying that, he has put forth an excuse for every one of his supporters to acknowledge their failure as not being their fault. Their unhappiness isn’t their fault. They are up against powerful forces, rich people and successful people who simply don’t want to share anything. They’re very selfish. But Obama is trying to get it away from them. And that process is leading to rising debt. Student loans, they’re getting more expensive. The cost of college is more expensive. But Obama is seen as trying to solve all of that. The fact that his policies, the fact that his presidency is in fact causing all of this, is a connection unmade by a majority of people who vote in this country. It has to be that. There can be no other explanation for this.

These polls are frequent now. The number of people who oppose Obamacare, for example, has always been 55 to 58, in some cases 60%. But even he is not held accountable for Obamacare. The middle class tax cut that happened when the payroll tax cut ended and everybody’s paychecks in January got smaller, that wasn’t because of Obama. Obama has spent the last four years promising people that isn’t gonna happen and he’s told people that the deficit, whatever his policies are, is not gonna add a dime to the deficit. That’s a quote. And if you make less than $250,000 a year you’re not gonna pay any more in taxes, and yet you got a tax increase.

It must be the Republicans doing something, must be, ’cause Obama said it wasn’t gonna happen. And the deficit keeps getting bigger and the debt, but it can’t be Obama because he said whatever he did and does won’t even add a dime, so it must be what the Republicans continue to do. This is now the low-information voter sees it. This is how they calculate or compute or hear all of this. But Obama has no accountability. He has no responsibility. There is no relationship to Obama’s presidency and policies, to the reality of life on the ground in America today. And he pulls that off by never, ever being seen as governing and by always being in campaign mode, and what are you doing in campaign mode? You’re running against something. And that is the key. You’re never seen as in charge of everything.

That is why people end up supporting his executive orders, I might add to all this. Because he’s tried everything. And they still can’t get the unemployment number down, still can’t get job creation going, we still can’t stop gun violence. He’s gonna have to do something, the NRA and Wayne LaPierre and the powerful gun lobby, they just won’t stop. They just won’t compromise. Gabby Giffords and her husband have begged people, and Sarah Brady, they’ve begged people to stop using their guns and to give them up, and they won’t. So if Obama has to use an executive order to do it, so be it. What he’s really doing, you can’t even convince them what he’s really doing. Sit down and talk to them, you can’t.

You can’t convince them they’re wrong because they will never admit they are that blind. They will never admit that they are that hoodwinkable. They’ll never admit that they are that foolable and gullible or whatever. Plus, he’s the first black president. He cannot be a bad guy. All this stuff you say about him, Mr. Limbaugh, it can’t be true. I hear him speak and he desperately wants me to have a better life. I hear it every day. And he’s trying. But the rich won’t give up what they’ve got. They won’t pay their fair share of things. So the debt goes up, the deficits get higher, jobs are lost, the housing market shrinks, all the while Obama tells people the opposite is happening.

The State of the Union, why, you would think this economy’s roaring back. In fact, that might have been a tactical error he made. He might get away with it because so few people actually watched it, but to go out there and start raving about this economy and how home values are coming back, if yours aren’t somehow you might be being left out, which means Obama’s not fixing it for you. So he’s gotta be very careful in talking up this country. He’s gotta be very careful in talking up the economy.

Let me play a sound bite then I have to take a quick time-out. This is Bret Baier on Fox last night, and I guess the All-Star Panel, and it’s Juan Williams. And Bret Baier said, “What about this pledge, ‘I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to the deficit’? The RNC put out that ad showing all the times he said that before, including with health care, which clearly as you know, even the nonpartisan CBO is saying those numbers continue to go up by the month, so he’s adding more than dimes, Juan. What do you say?”

WILLIAMS: Put health care to the side for just a moment and say that in terms of the other spending, stimulus spending and the like, you can understand that any president had to take steps in terms of economic rescue for the country and the like. Health care costs do seem to be going up, more so than he had predicted although as we know the rate of growth of health care costs for this period is actually declined.